Abacus Federal Savings Bank (國寶銀行) is a bank in the United States founded in December 1984 by a group of business leaders from the Chinese American community in New York City. The founders' original purpose was to provide banking services to immigrants and local residents of lower Manhattan. As the Chinese immigrant population grew in the 1980s and 1990s, the bank retained its original mission, but expanded its size and scope. It now has six branches covering New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Besides the traditional banking services, it also offers insurance and securities through its subsidiaries. Abacus is federally chartered. Its mortgage and other services extend to all states in the United States.
Abacus has a wholly owned insurance subsidiary, the Abacus Insurance Agency Corp. (AIAC), which provides life, health, accident and annuity insurance.
In May 2012, New York prosecutors indicted the bank and 19 of its employees on charges of fraud in relation to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mortgages that had been sold to Fannie Mae between 2005 and 2010. The bank was accused of falsifying loan applications so that borrowers would qualify for mortgages. Abacus has said that it uncovered the improper behavior itself, reported it to the regulator, and fired the employee in question. It also said it was not involved with the fraudulent packaging of subprime mortgage securities and had a mortgage default rate of 0.5%, a tenth of the national average.
The unreasonableness of the prosecution, in light of the treatment received by large banks, has been questioned by media outlets.
The Bank, along with its former Chief Credit Officer and its former loan supervisor, were acquitted of all charges brought by the New York prosecutors in a jury trial in New York Supreme Court on June 3 and 4, 2015.
On September 9, 2015, the Court, at the recommendation of the New York prosecutors themselves, dismissed all of the charges against the remaining defendants, due to lack of evidence.
The story is told in Steve James' feature-length documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 11, 2016.
References
Further reading
- Taibbi, Matt (2014). "Unintended Consequences" The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 978-0-8129-9342-4. pp. 3â€"51.
